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Sunday, April 17, 2011

A while back I posted an article that involved sample artwork by the legendary artist Michael Turner [April 21, 1971 – June 27, 2008] the founder of Aspen Comics Studios in San Diego, CA. Some of the art showcased back in that blog post were from the graphic novel titled Superman Batman: Supergirl, which was written by Jeph Loeb. It was published back in 2005.
And I was unaware that an animated movie was released last year [in September 2010], based on the same book. The cartoon feature was titled Superman/Batman: Apocalypse and it was a commercial success, released direct-to-video. About 80% of the movie was taken straight out of the pages of the comic collection, which simplified the workload for the storyboard artists at Warner Bros Animation.

[Left: Cover to the graphic novel: Superman Batman: Supergirl , Right:The Front and back images of the DVD case for Superman/Batman: Apocalypse]

Cartoon Pitch:
The graphic novel showcased the origins of Supergirl, and how she seemingly fell out of the sky - her life pod crashes into the sea at a harbor in Gotham city, when the adventure begins. Batman and Superman find her roaming about the streets, causing havoc per her incredible powers. She is gradually calmed, and the Kryptonian takes her under his wing, after she is literally debriefed in the Batcave. Later, Wonder Woman and the Amazonians show up to grab the girl, claiming she is a female blood warrior who belongs with them. And eventually Darksied abducts her. Hence, the DC Comics Big-three and Barda join forces and head to planet Apocalypse to redeem the young girl... ###

That is a summary, as I've left out a lot of the major plots/awesome battles that unfold in the movie - since I noted that a lot of extra stuff was added to lengthen the movie, and some plights were changed to enhance the story. But those of you that are familiar with the graphic novel will know the basic blueprint of this one, which was an instant classic per the strong foundation laid by Michael Turner and his colorist, Peter Steigerwald [the current CEO of Aspen Comics].
I'll show you some random digital pics from the novel [they are large files, so big that you can read them]. And then you can watch the clips from the 2D animated movie below, to see how it was translated into action sequences.

EDIT: YouTube deleted the account that hosted the vid clip above, but someone else uploaded it over HERE.

Anyway, There is a second brief clip below, tied to the showcased comic pages:

And below is a peculiar scene from the graphic novel, in which Batman confronts Darksied and literally calls his bluff, lest Apocalypse be destroyed by a host of reprogrammed hellspore nukes scattered all over the face of the planet, courtesy of the Dark Knight. It is probably the most popular result for running Google searches on Batman VS Darkseid.... and the masked detective won, although he suffered one hell of a beating.